A lightweight markup language for formatting plain text. Used all over the web, including in this article!

Similar to JSON but strives to be even more human-friendly. Great for configuration files.

A widely used markup language for encoding documents in a way both humans and computers can read.

A structured collection of data, often with multiple tables. Access, MySQL, and Oracle are big players.

Lightweight data interchange format that’s easy for humans to read and write.

For tabular data like spreadsheets. Very simple and universally supported.

Any file that’s been made smaller with compression. ZIP and RAR for general files, MP3 for audio, JPG for images, etc.

Data organized into a grid of cells. Microsoft Excel’s XLSX is a de facto standard.

For slideshows and lectures. Microsoft’s PPTX is commonly used.

Moving pictures and sound together. MP4, AVI and MKV are prevalent formats.